Bearish Signals from the Bollinger Bands for 5 Renewable Energy Equipment Stocks

The renewable energy industry has performed incredibly well over the last 10 months. After bottoming at $21.11 in March, the Invesco Solar ETF (TAN) has rallied over 400%. As you can imagine, such a rally has caused the ETF and most of the stocks in the group to reach overbought levels on their weekly charts. In most cases they are also overbought on the daily and monthly charts as well.

I ran a scan on December 24 for stocks in overbought territory that also had their daily stochastic indicators make bearish crossovers. On that list were five different renewable energy equipment stocks and the Invesco Solar ETF. The five stocks were:

            First Solar (FSLR)

            JinkoSolar (JKS)

            Sunnova Energy International (NOVA)

            Plug Power (PLUG)

            Sunpower (SPWR)

When I pulled up these five stocks on the Tickeron Technical Analysis Screener, I couldn’t help but notice all five stocks had received bearish signals from the Bollinger Bands indicator within the last three days. Two of the five, Sunnova and JinkoSolar, had bearish signals generated on December 28.

The Tickeron Scorecard has Plug Power ranked as a “sell” and First Solar is ranked as a “strong buy”. The other three have “buy” ratings. Despite the scorecard grades, there are some areas of concern on the fundamental side. All five stocks have poor SMR ratings and four of the five have poor P/E Growth Ratings. We also see that three of the five are overvalued at this time.

I looked at the analysts’ ratings and the short interest ratios for these five stocks in order to get a sense of the sentiment toward them. There is quite a bit of pessimism toward First Solar and Sunpower while the sentiment is neutral on JinkoSolar.

Sunnova Energy and Plug Power both have quite a bit of optimism directed at them right now. Both companies have 11 analysts following them with 10 of the 11 rating the stock as a “buy”. In both instances there is one “hold” rating on each stock. The short interest ratio for Sunnova is very low at 1.6 and Plug’s is below average at 2.49.

What all of this tells me is that if the bearish crossovers from the stochastic indicators and the bearish signals from the Bollinger Bands turn out to be accurate, it will be driven primarily from technical factors. The overbought levels could cause some investors to take profits.

To give you an idea of how the stocks compare to one another and to other stocks in general, I used the comparison feature on Tickeron to compare Plug, Sunnova, and First Solar. If you recall Plug was rated as a “sell”, Sunnova was rated as a “buy”, and First Solar is rated as a “strong buy”.